Here is a summary I prepared of Stephan Kinsella’s April 27, 2014 non-debate with Jan Helfeld on minarchism vs. anarchy.

I have preserved the foul language that Kinsella used, to get a full picture of his anger issues and irrationality about a topic that demands rationality.

10m – Ad hominem by Kinsella, refers to “God damn Randian state”
14m – Helfeld Disputes that state is a criminal organization
– Mentions necessity of gang warfare under anarchism – Kinsella gets annoyed
15m – Kinsella’s rude, saying “you’re reading something?”
17m – Domestic and foreign criminals checked by power of state
– Kinsella interrupts again, Jan gets mad, Kinsella says “Jesus Christ”
18m – Gang warfare in every city
19m – Town receiving an extortion letter
21m – Disagreements over punishments
– Kinsella interrupts again, saying his time should be up
23m – Helfeld says he doesn’t want to follow rules, like most anarchists
– Feuds and vendettas
– What happens if you can’t trust contracts will be enforced?
24m – Kinsella interrupts again
26m – Gets annoyed again when asks Helfeld two questions, does the state commit aggression, and is it justified?
27m – Kinsella said “Fuck the format”
– No aggression when people agree to have a govt to protect their rights
29m – Helfeld said everyone is born into a system, with govt or not – says implied contract
30m – Helfeld claims he’s not a statist, Kinsella says he is
33m – Slavery in constitution
34m – Kinsella says “fuck the judge” to Helfeld saying don’t tell the judge he’s against govt
35m – U.S. showed benefit of limited govt
36m – Kinsella says this is ridiculous, re: each asking 12 questions of each other
37m – Says as an anarchist, that’s “bullshit”
38m – Kinsella says it’s irrelevant what Jan thinks now, saying “be a big boy”
– Says he can’t be civilized with this guy
– Saying interrupting is less than taxing — saying Jan is a statist
39m – Jan called Molyneux mollynukes
40m – Kinsella arrogant in responding to no, that it’s not ok to initiate force
41m – Asked is it ok to take water from someone by force — Kinsella asked, “what’s the relevance of the question?”
– Said it’s a “bullshit question”
42m – Kinsella says he doesn’t know what to do
43m – Jan says that he doesn’t realize that under duress, he can violate rights
44m – Ad hominem calling Jan “a washed up lawyer”
– Called him a loser, saying he doesn’t even pronounce ad hominem properly
45m – Called him a “craven coward defender of the state,” saying he’s raising certain issues in order to justify the state
47m – Helfeld said Larken Rose said, in a debate, that he would die in that situation [drowning and if someone in a boat next to him wouldn’t let him on]
– Said he might have been one of the few who would, whereas most who say they would do so, wouldn’t
48m – Kinsella said “Fuck no,” re: Jan’s behaviour
49m – Says “it’s disagreeable to tax by you motherfuckers,” to Jan
– Said “you are nothing”, being a statist
50m – Kinsella said to the moderator before that he had previously been a minarchist and a Randian
51m – Kinsella said to Jan, “you better think it through, motherfucker”
52m – Jan laughing
53m – Jan says there are two cases — if dispute resolution groups have nukes, or not, asking what would you do if Putin has nukes
57m – Jan says he would violate rights to save his life if he had to hang onto a boat
1h5m – Kinsella says non-aggression principle should be a model for laws in a society
– Says he doesn’t know if he would steal to survive
1h7m – Kinsella said statist libertarians are old wave, and he can’t wait for them to die out
1h8m – Kinsella called the Founding Fathers racist, bigoted slave owners
1h15m – Funny echo on Jan’s side
1h16m – Kinsella says he’s not opposed to govt, he’s opposed to the state
1h19m – Will criminal gangs attack others they perceive as weaker
1h21m – Kinsella says he no longer has any interest in talking
1h23m – Kinsella said “you’re idiots”
1h24m – Helfeld said this system is better than gang warfare
1h26m – Helfeld says he doesn’t support taxation for redistribution of wealth, and Kinsella says “they take my taxes every April 16th, motherfucker”
1h27m – Kinsella said he’s probably paid more in taxes in one year than Helfeld has in his entire life
1h28m – Kinsella calls Jan a fake, fraud and liar
1h30m – Kinsella said Jan is welcome to his opinion and “to shut the fuck up for a second”
1h31m – Called Jan his enemy
1h33m – Called Jan a “washed up loser”
– Said “Fuck off, bye”

5 Responses

Wow in spite of the shenanigans this gave me something to ponder. Too bad Kinsella behaves like such a d-bag he can’t even articulate, or perhaps even GRASP.

But he did set it up: Should there be a “State” … a separate entity with it’s own interests, property and powers…?

That is an interesting core question, one that I’ve never really thought through before, and my first instinct is to say NO, that Government in the broad sense must exist — even if it’s one person “governing” the actions of a rapist by hitting him in the head with a brick — to PROTECT OTHERS’ RIGHTS, but that does not imply there should be an entity with it’s own interests and agenda. We all know where that has lead.

First blush. Thanks for posting, very clarifying to my own thoughts and actions (I work with an extremely well-funded advocacy group to advance small-government positions) and I look forward to refining my positions based on this new (to me) insight.

That freakin echo though … ugh. And Kinsella … I’m sorry but clean up your act, you were not behaving in a civilized manner and more importantly, let emotion get in the way of debate. You never even asked him if (and if so why) government requires the entity of the state in his view — and (again, first blush) that seems to me to be an essential question.

State-less government would of course get rid of “the interest of the State” … and as I’m fond of pointing out, any utopia must by definition be an anarchy….

Thank you for posting this. I have found Kinsella’s behavior objectionable for quite some time. He is routinely rude and disrespectful of anyone who doesn’t agree with him. If you challenge his position he tells you to read his book before he’ll even talk to you. Having read much of his stuff, I agree with many of his points, but it is filled with so much arrogance it is difficult to stomach. It must be wonderful to KNOW in your heart that you are incapable of fallacy and all who disagree with you are morons.

There is no such thing as a consistently civilized society of any kind without a consensus of majority public opinion in favor of vigilant and immediate forceful defense of any individual or collective of individuals violating another individual’s or collective of individuals’

Hence the need for all children of such civilizations to be fed the mother’s milk of inalienable rights that no consensus whatsoever should be allowed to violate. If the medium of propaganda are in the hands of those in favor of win-lose dialectics born of extortion, which all redistribution of earned wealth always and at all times is, then you have a sick and diseased organism that only stays healthy long enough to be devoured by parasites.

So, whether somebody’s an ‘Anarchist’ or a “Libertarian” is a pointless question, since there is no such thing as a “moral” government of any kind that operates through extortion by violating free thought, free choice and freedom of association. All fraud and initiated force has its recourse in the principle of self-defense in the criminal courts. Once government initiates force in favor of one group and against another, with no justification in self-defense or a bogus justification, that’s the end of its legitimacy, period. Fascism and National Socialism succeeded to the degree that they did because most of what they did was long overdue self-defense against usurers, counterfeiters and nation rapists. And they failed to the degree that they ran extortion rackets themselves. The father figure ‘leader’ of a nation is no different than that of a family: only so many ass-whippings will be tolerated by the children being led as what-was-coming-to-them for doing wrong or done for a good reason, and the praise for doing right should far outweigh the disciplinary actions.

There is nothing more to say. No long arguments between 2 shills are even necessary.

“The technique of infamy is to invent two lies and to get people arguing heatedly about which one of them is true.” — Ezra Pound

If propaganda was in the hands of a Jefferson, Ezra Pound or Lysander Spooner, you would see the whole country change within a year and within 2 or 3 years you would see such a sea change in the quality of life, you won’t be able to understand what made people put up with so many weaponized narratives for so long which added up to nothing more than the same old extortion schemes camouflaged in new clothes.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” (Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816)

“It is not often possible to say of those acts that are called vices, that they really are vices, except in degree. That is, it is difficult to say of any actions, or courses of action, that are called vices, that they really would have been vices, if they had stopped short of a certain point. The question of virtue or vice, therefore, in all such cases, is a question of quantity and degree, and not of the intrinsic character of any single act, by itself. This fact adds to the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of any one’s — except each individual for himself — drawing any accurate line, or anything like any accurate line, between virtue and vice — that is, of telling where virtue ends, and vice begins. And this is another reason why this whole question of virtue and vice should be left for each person to settle for himself.” — Lysander Spooner, “Vices Are Not Crimes, A Vindication Of Moral Liberty”

“To know what actions are virtuous, and what vicious — in other words, to know what actions tend, on the whole, to happiness, and what to unhappiness — in the case of each and every man, in each and all the conditions in which they may severally be placed, is the profoundest and most complex study to which the greatest human mind ever has been, or ever can be, directed. It is, nevertheless, the constant study to which each and every man — the humblest in intellect as well as the greatest — is necessarily driven by the desires and necessities of his own existence. It is also the study in which each and every person, from his cradle to his grave, must necessarily form his own conclusions; because no one else knows or feels, or can know or feel, as he knows and feels, the desires and necessities, the hopes, and fears, and impulses of his own nature, or the pressure of his own circumstances.” ~ Lysander Spooner, “Vices Are Not Crimes, A Vindication Of Moral Liberty”

“Imitation is the result of inadequate information. Information results in change. Change requires energy. Energy is the result of adequate information. Energy is directly proportional to the amount of information about the structure of a system. Norbert Wiener: ‘Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjustment felt upon it . . . to live effectively is to live with adequate information.’ 26

In communication theory and the laws of thermodynamics the quantity called entropy is the amount of energy reversibly exchanged from one system in the universe to another. Entropy also is the measure of disorder within those systems. It measures the lack of information about the structure of the system. For our purposes ‘structure of the system’ should be taken to mean ‘the human condition,’ the universal subject of aesthetic activity. Entropy should be understood as the degree of our ignorance about that condition. Ignorance always increases when a system’s messages are redundant. Ignorance is not a state of limbo in which no information exists, but rather a state of increasing chaos due to misinformation about the structure of the system.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is constant: it cannot be created or destroyed; its form can change, but not its quantity.

The Second Law states that the amount of energy within a local system is naturally entropic–it tends toward disorder, dissipation, incoherence. And since energy is defined as ‘capacity to rearrange elemental order,’ entropy, which runs counter to that capacity, means less potential for change. We’ve learned from physics that the only anti-entropic force in the universe, or what is called negentropy (negative entropy), results from the process of feedback. Feedback exists between systems that are not closed but rather open and contingent upon other systems. In the strictest sense there are no truly ‘closed’ systems anywhere in the universe; all processes impinge upon and are affected by other processes in some way. However, for most practical purposes, it is enough to say that a system is ‘closed’ when entropy dominates the feedback process, that is, when the measure of energy lost is greater than the measure of energy gained.

The phenomenon of man, or of biological life on earth taken as a process, is negentropic because its subsystems feed energy back into one another and thus are self-enriching, regenerative. Thus energy is wealth, and wealth according to Buckminster Fuller is “the number of forward days a given system is sustainable.” Biologist John Bleibtreu arrived at a similar conclusion when he noted that the concept of time can best be viewed as a function of the Second Law of Thermodynamics–that the measure of entropy in a system is a measure of its age, or the passage of time since the system originated. In other words, the degree of a system’s entropy is equal to redundancy or stasis whereas its negentropy is equal to kinesis or change. So information becomes energy when it contributes to the self-enriching omni-regenerative wealth of the system. When it’s not contributing (i.e., redundant) it is allowing the natural entropy to increase.” — Gene Youngblood

“I have heard both Libertarians and anarchists claim their limited gov and no gov will suddenly produce a society where people will respect each other”

Actually, it wouldn’t be sudden. You seem to presume that the presence of government is what keeps humans “honest” (Hobbesian Leviathan anybody?) to which I disagree. History is filled with examples of societies getting on just fine without an interventionist state. A limited, functional state is not only legitimate but one that keeps corruption at a minimum. Rome and Washington are classic examples of Republics that flourished under a system of governance that truly were “classically liberal”.

What we have at the moment is pure cronyism where the state is too closely tied with corporate interest; where the welfare state strips people of their moral agency.

I’m only 26 plus minutes in and already I have formed a not so nice opinion of Kinsella’s rude and childish behavior, which seems to that of most if not all pro anarchists. As much as it pains me I will continue to listen even if I have to have a drink (I quit 5 years ago) to calm my feelings of contempt. Kinsella keeps interrupting Helfeld with his no rules position.

Of course, I have heard both Libertarians and anarchists claim their limited gov and no gov will suddenly produce a society where people will respect each other and companies will conduct business honestly because if they don’t they will not survive, as people will not do business with them. And both are for open borders although all or almost all Libertarians don’t agree on this despite it being their party’s official platform.